Jane Routley's Blog, page 10

Schooldays

Last week school started back. Quoth a young girl in my carriage " I'll get to see Mr Sun glasses again. Oh no what if he was in year 12 and he' s not back this year." Ah that took me back to the good old days, when I too travelled on the train. The good old days of crushes on tall dark handsome strangers in Trinity or Carey uniforms, the days when throwing lumps of blue tack out of carriage windows at groups of boys constituted a pick up line.

Teleconferenceing

Also at the supervising station, a lady seemed to be teleconferencing with mobile phone and lap top on the bench outside the kiosk for an hour between 7 and 8 until the noise of rush hour got too loud. Then she moved to the corridor outside the insalubrious toilets and teleconferenced
on the floor there for another half hour. ??????
An itinerant travel writer talking to her publisher perhaps?

A poem!

A poem!
Today the staff at my supervising station received a big box of chocs and a poem thanking them for their help in all weathers and wishing them a Happy Year of the Horse. Someone does love us railway folk after all! (And no the chocs weren't poisoned, just in case you were going to say that)

Sunflowers

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the piece of waste land where people were living in tents had undergone a change. The number of tents has dwindled to one and a half. An artist has come along and sown it with sunflowers. And they are now coming into bloom. So if you are travelling between Flemington Bridge and Macaulay keep an eye out to the left. I asked the artist how the guys in the tents felt about the art work and he said they were basically cool with it but felt a bit exposed when the initial work was done. The artists name is Ben Morieson. The work is called Fieldwork and here is his diary of the project http://ben900.wix.com/fieldwork

The little old man

A little old man regularly takes the train two stations down the line to check the past use-by sale bins at the local supermarket. His wizened face is the colour and texture of a dried fig, he always has a rollie sticking out of his mouth, and his dusty black baseball cap is on backwards. Over the year, he’s given me a number out-of-date yoghurts and mars bars. Alas his heavy Greek accent is almost incomprehensible to me. I know the conversation always starts with the weather but then??? After a few minutes of him talking and me nodding and smiling, he pulls a wry face as if he’s told me the punch line of a joke (maybe he has) and darts quickly off as if avoiding a scolding. He sometimes leaves little piles of bread and noodles for the birds. What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t take the noodles out of the packets.

The lost child

Occasionally it happens. A mother struggles out onto the platform with a pram or a child, the second child is a bit slow in following, the train may be late, the visibility is poor, the door slams shut and the train takes off with the unaccompanied child inside.
In an American crime drama, something sinister would ensue, but in the real world there is still a lot of Benign about.
In the 2 mins it took for the train to reach my station, a kindly couple had taken the screaming child under their wing, red buttons had been pushed and everyone was on top of the situation. An anxious train driver rushed down the train and oversaw the couple handing the lost little girl over to me.
She was a dear little thing in a pink dress who told me that she was four years old. Once I’d reassured her that mummy would be coming on the next train and given her what presents my station contained – a bottle of water and an old children’s book – and promised her that I wouldn’t go away, she settled down quietly to play with the ticket machine. Few little kids can resist that touch screen. Ten minutes later a very relieved mother arrived and took her away - on the tram.

Locomotives

Got chatting with a man on the platform who told me he’d been working for a rail freight company that had recently closed down. “Give you an example of why,” he said. When one of their locomotives broke down they payed me overtime to drive a car to Newcastle and stay overnight to pick up the part. Said trains were too unreliable.

In which Jane's dignity is somewhat compromised

How? By being locked in the toilets, is how. Someone shut the bolt outside the door and it took 10 minutes of rattling the door and yelling “help let me out!” before a rather bemused looking backpacker opened the bolt and did so. Who was the culprit?
Where they malicious or just being tidy? Or one of the number of children on the station at the time? It was a reminder to me to carry my mobile phone in my pocket so at least I could call someone from the central station to take the train down and let me out. Strange thing is it turns out everyone’s been locked in a toilet sometime.

Into the pit

Arrived at my supervising station to find a battered looking visually impaired man sitting in the staff room. He’d fallen into the pit (on to the tracks) Though he was badly bruised, he was fairly fatalistic about the fall, but this station is extremely busy and the chances of his being run over high, so if anything the station staff were more shaken then he was. They’d rushed around at top speed, stopping the trains and pulling him out before an unlucky accident became a tragedy.

Police

A very distressed-looking middle-aged man was sitting in the platform 2 waiting-room while three policemen stood over him with the nonchalant grace of the young, strong and fit. Their Greek god beauty took my breath away, but their intentions were entirely benign. They’d found him drunk and asleep on the train and since he had nowhere to go, they were waiting for an ambulance, which I guess would transport him back (hopefully) into the social safety net. In the meantime they listened patiently to him rave and at one point took him round the back of the waiting room and help him upright while he had a pee.(Were they humiliated or unfazed by this small necessary service, I wonder? ) I’ve often seen police caring for life’s casualties, buying food for junkies etc and its oddly confronting to my left-wing preconceptions.
Another homeless man who got off the train didn’t see this scene as benign. Galvanized into memoir, he sat down on his shopping trolley and started writing in a notebook in big red letters. When I peeped over his shoulder, he was writing about being bashed and in between that describing the other people on the platform. A less structured version of what I’m doing now.
After everyone had gone, I went over to Platform 2 to tidy away the drunk’s bottle and was startled to discover he’d been drinking our favourite medium priced Cab Sav.